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Can You Save Any Money Making Your Own Ice Cream?

My addiction to saving money is matched only by my penchant for ice cream. It’s a good thing I inherited my mother’s skinny genes!

I recently asked my husband for an ice cream maker for my birthday. (I’m a DIY nut diving into homesteading, one food group at a time.) Now I want to know if we’re actually saving money making homemade ice cream.

Upfront Costs

The challenge of saving money by doing-it-yourself is the upfront cost.

We brew our own beer, but had to spend $109 in equipment to make our first batch. If you sew your own clothes, you have to stitch past the roughly $200 it costs to get a decent sewing machine to sew your first skirt. You can see where I’m going.

I like the Ben & Jerry’s vanilla ice cream recipe, which calls for the following ingredients:

2 cups cream

1 cups milk (I use whole)

1 cup sugar

2 eggs

2 teaspoons vanilla

When I crunch the numbers to determine the cost of the amount called for in the recipe (instead of using the cost of the entire item…for instance the cost of two eggs versus the cost of a dozen), here’s how the math looks.

Cream – $2.14

Milk – $.24

Sugar – $.33

Eggs – $.41

Vanilla – $.83

Cream is by far the most expensive ingredient in a batch of homemade ice cream. If only I owned a cow! But I digress. Back to the calculator.

The cost of one batch of homemade vanilla ice cream adds up to $3.95, just a nickel less than buying a pint.

But wait!

My homemade batch makes one quart, which is the same as TWO PINTS. So my ice cream machine makes twice as much ice cream for essentially the same cost. That means homemade ice cream costs half of what it does in the store.

Except: The fancy pants ice cream maker.

It wasn’t a huge investment, but at $60, it certainly adds to the cost of homemade ice cream. Let’s amortize the $60 ice cream maker over one year. And let’s estimate that I make one one-quart batch of homemade ice cream every other week, which adds up to 26 batches a year.